When Luis Alberto Otero confessed to police he sodomized a female relative, the 25-year-old Santa Ana resident had a novel excuse: It was her idea.

She was 8 at the time. And that was two years after he started penetrating her with his fingers.

Otero has now been sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison for forcibily sodomizing the girl in an elevator and an alley.

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Otero had been convicted by a jury on Jan. 19 of two felony counts of aggravated sexual assault
of a child and two felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14.

He assaulted the girl sexually between April 2003 and May 2007. When she was 8 years old, Otero approached her while she was playing outside her home with a friend, lured her away by promising to buy her a Slurpee and then forced her into an alley where he forcibly sodomized her twice as she struggled
to escape.

The girl later told a social worker at school about the abuse, which led to an investigation, arrest and conviction of Otero.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper’s first calendar editor. He went on to be managing editor, executive editor and is now senior staff writer.